They didn't want me to see the park. Why?
In the distance I heard the crackle of gunfire. Adrenaline purged the sleep from my limbs, and Rudy cried out in alarm as I surged to my feet. Gunfire toward the center of town. Five shots. Pistol, I thought. I rotated my ears towards the sound. Two more shots fixed the direction. Different gun. A gunfight? Not good. Were the mundanes shooting at each other?
I was on the ground heading toward the shots before I knew what I was doing. Listen Richard, you tell Jules that he can't keep us in this bubble. He's got to let it go.
What? No, the inquisitors are out there, Thomas! We'll need much more tass before we're ready for that. That's why we need to get to work on the harvesting. You need the tass too. You’re only halfway to healing your friend.
The town knows you exist. Pitchforks would be coming.
Richard gave a mental wince, momentarily reliving the scene in the supermarket. We're working on that. Look Thomas, we really need your help here. You're our only other familiar.
I'll meet you at the park. I have to see what people are shooting at, I thought at him.
The munds are shooting at each other? Thomas, stay away! Are you near O'Meara's?
Maybe.
Stop being difficult! Stay away. I'm going to come and get you. We can't have you get hurt! Then I saw it. The thought behind his frustration slipped through the link. The black plane. The hunger plane was coming through again and this the time people in it had guns. Fuck.
"Tho—" I slammed the link closed. He didn't give a damn about the people in Grantsville. No, that was unfair. He'd care enough to make little sounds of the sympathy toward their plight but never enough care to actually do something about it.
Four pinpricks peeled one of my ears away from my head. "Thomas!" Rudy's voice was in my ear, nearly a shout. Apparently he'd been attempting to get my attention for a while.
"Yeah?" I answered, my pace not slowing.
"If we're trying to get away from the guns, your trotting in the exact wrong direction, and I'm fresh out of elemental-powered machinery."
"We're practicing Spiderman 101," I told him, forcing my ears to relax.
"That implies you have great power, which unless one of the magi are going to flashbang to your side ready to throw down, we don't really possess any. Plus, big cats in scared small towns are probably the definition of bullet attractors."
"Tell me something I don't know," I said.
The squirrel lapsed into silence, and I heard the rip of Velcro. "I have three firecrackers and no bottle rockets."
***
The black plane had landed squarely on one of Grantsville's newer developments, just old enough that nearly all the three-to-five-bedroom houses were sold and occupied, with that Just Built smell being replaced with the odors of children and pets.
"Oh bury your peanuts in the ground and roast them with a nuke," Rudy swore as I crept through the woods about a quarter mile from the development’s first row of houses. I could see a diffuse haze of purple ahead, but I wasn't close enough for details. I paused mid-step, my front paw raised. The scent of blood drifted lazily through the air. Sirens doppled in the distance but were coming this way.
"What? I can't see yet," I said.
Rudy climbed up onto my head, leaning forward so the underside of his body blocked out the top of my vision. "Yep, that’s no transition. That’s a shallowing."
A growl escaped my throat and I continued on, placing my rear paws carefully in the depressions my front paws had made. We emerged in the back yard of a two-story house. Reality here appeared untouched, but the sweet scent of fresh blood rolled over me like a wave and made my stomach rumble. I found myself calculating how long it'd been since I'd eaten as I crept along a backyard fence. My human squeamishness had been one of the first things to go after my change. Before, the sight of blood would induce panicky heart palpitations, but now my body had decidedly different instincts. Unless it smelled of rot or disease, gore was the freshest of meat. The only emotional response I had was the urge to lick my chops. My sense of concern overwhelmed my stomach when a friend was injured, but strangers? The cougar thought they were made of meat for him.
Someone inside the house clearly wasn't as conflicted as I. There were ripping noises and growls combined with the periodic crunch of bone. Rudy hunkered low against my neck. "So much for saving the day," he whispered.
I had to agree, but I kept creeping forward, my ears rotating like radar dishes, listening for any hint of something sneaking up on us. I made it into the front yard. The purple haze looked to start one street over, but the carnage had started here. Four figures hunched in front of the house across the way, two adults and two kids engaging in cannibalism as a family bonding activity. Maybe you couldn't call it cannibalism, as the figures had clearly strayed from humanity. Their limbs were too long, their mouths so wide that their jawbones might touch in the back of their necks and they pulled hunks of fat out of the pile of flesh that had been a man with claws three times the size of my own. The four all glowed with that sickly mixed of blended realities.
"Rudy, how far can a creature of a shallowing get from it?"
"Once they're made, they have a link to it. They can leave. The more they feed, the more a plane like this will spread. Thomas, we have to close that rift," Rudy said in urgent tones. "The meat's the start. They're going after what they know is edible, but to them everything is edible. Once they realize that, they'll grow unstoppable."
"You've seen this before?" I hunkered low in the grass and prayed the things wouldn't spot us.
"Not like this. Never like this. Occasionally a hungry spirit from one of these planes gets out and sows destruction before the magi kill it. But now the reality itself has gotten a foothold."
"Okay, so how do we close the rift?"
Rudy chittered with frustration. "You call the magi. They generally will thank you and then close it."
I had a suspicious feeling this hunger plane was tangled up with all the rest of them. "Can't you do something? Anything?"
"I'm a squirrel, Thomas! I chuck acorns and explosives at problems, neither of which are going to help.”
"Can't we force Jules to untie space? Let the Veil back in?"
"The Veil's idea of solution for this might involve an 'accidental' nuclear missile strike. We need a team of magi to seal this thing off."
I clicked my teeth together in frustration. The sirens were getting loud enough that I couldn't be sure that I'd hear one of those things creeping up on us. Richard had been right. There was nothing I could do about the black plane. I carefully retraced my steps before breaking into a run toward the sirens. I'd been taking nightly constitutionals around this area for months, an instinctual drive to know my territory. I'd attempted to fight the urge for a month before finally giving in once Tallow complained about the tracks my pacing had worn in the carpeting. I thanked entities unknown for it now, as I knew precisely how the cops would get to the development.
I had an idea, and it was a stupid one that would probably get me shot. But it was the only one I had to prevent the entirety of the Grantsville police department from getting eaten.
CHAPTER THIRTY
I sat on the orange line sans squirrel. He'd called me nuts and run off.
I curled my tail across the top of my forepaws, hiding my fully extended claws that itched to bite into the cracked asphalt. In the distance, but far too close for comfort, I heard sirens, the Weee-Dooo Weee-Dooo of three police cars. I couldn't see Rudy, but he and his firecrackers were off to my left somewhere in the trees, his little brain feverishly dreaming up ways of distracting the cops if this went south, maybe.
The place I'd chosen wasn't ideal. The road curved not 600 feet from my position. I could hear the engines now, roaring beneath the sirens. My stomach twisted into a fourth-dimensional knot and the tip of my tail twitched violently. Every instinct, some cat, some older than that, screamed at me to move, to run, to get out of the frackin
g way before you get pancaked, you stupid familiar!
Instead I gritted my teeth and dug my claws into the road. I promised my claws a good scratching of some nice furniture if we survived this.
The first car ripped around the corner and I knew I had made a mistake, a horrible mistake. As a citizen of the USA, you know cars, you're comfortable with them. While you’re inside one, everything is under your control. You perceive thirty-five miles per hour on a road to be a rather serene pace. Everything changes when you're out of the comfort of the driver’s seat and the same car is bearing down on you like the sadistic lovechild of a bear and a bullet. I saw the wide eyes of the officer as he realized far too late that I was in the center of the road. The tires screeched. I don't know what he did, but the emblem of Grantsville on the side door loomed impossibly large in my vision.
I jumped straight up. Had it not been a SUV, I might have cleared it and would have made it over even this one had it not been for the two-foot tall antenna that caught me right on the shoulder.
My first though was that I had made it, and the second involved wondering why the ground was sky blue. Then my shoulders and back flared with pain and the world went sideways for a moment as more tires screeched. A line of blistering pain ran across my neck and shoulder. The scent of my own blood wafted through my mouth. My own blood doesn't smell nearly as good as other people's blood. It’s got its own bitter tang to it. That’s how I knew it was mine.
The pop of a car door. "-Christ, Jake! We don't have time to see if the dog's alright! We have an active shooter!"
"We're stopped already. Take thirty seconds to put it out of its misery if it’s bad."
"Good news, officer," I said with a bit of a groan. "You didn't hit a dog, you hit a cat. Although I would still appreciate it if you felt bad about it." My vision cleared. I was still on the road but facing away from the median. I had a good view of the forest along the edge, but all the cops and their cars were behind me.
"Who's talking?"
"The cat who you just hit, who'd rather not add getting shot to his list of why he should have just napped through today," I said.
"Okay! That’s not funny! We're on important business!"
"Come on, Jake! We gotta go!" the cop on a mission from God called.
I grimaced. "Anyone who responds to that call is dead. It’s a trap. Everyone in that development is dead." I almost said, or worse, but I didn't really want to add complexity to the situation. "I'm going to get up now."
There wasn't an immediate objection, so slowly I rolled onto my stomach. My right shoulder felt like hell on magma day, a line of fire burning across my skin. Yet the limb held as I lifted myself up and looked at the officer. Youngish, he had his pistol out in both hands but pointed at the ground, his eyes flicking back and forth before resting on me. "Damn, that’s a big one," he said.
"One hundred and ninety-nine pounds to be precise. I don't quite hit the record books for male mountain lions, but I'm pretty far up there."
"Christ, you do talk." The cop's brown eyes got big. "Oh my God, Grover's Grocery." Now I could clearly see down the barrel of his gun.
"Jake!" A woman had gotten out of other side of the SUV. I recognized her leathery, beaten face as one of the several cops that had taken pot shots at me six months ago.
"Hi May!" I said. "Long time no see. Remember that time you thought I was a dog?" The woman stared at me as if I had grown a second head. "Ray made a joke about a cougar party? Doesn't that ring a bell? You told him to shut up. If Ray is here, I want him to know I find that whole cougar slash older woman thing very offensive." Slowly, recognition along with bewilderment crept into her face.
Great, she recognized me now. Although I'd have to say that encounter really wouldn't prove my beneficence. However, she'd stopped calling for everyone to get back in their cars. "Now that I have your attention…the place you're all heading is full of cannibalistic zombies, and if you go there, they will attempt to eat you. If you shoot your way to the source, you'll become a cannibalistic zombie too. The best way to deal with this is containment. Also watch out for a giant spider loose in the area made out of tools." I looked at Officer Jake. "Now could you please lower the gun on me? I really need to have somebody to take care of this shoulder."
Jake's mouth had tightened into a thin line of a frown, his eyes squinted. "No. You're under arrest, Mr. Mountain Lion."
"What?" Of course, I thought to myself.
"You appear to know what's going on here, and I'm not going to let you out of my sight until you tell us what's happened to our town." The cop's voice was calm, though he didn't lower his gun.
Damn it. This never happens in the fairytales, I thought with a bit of bitterness. The mythical talking animals appear, dispense cryptic advice and then fade into the fog. I didn't want to try to explain everything to them. I'd be stuck in a cell at the police station for days. Then if the technomagi ever let the Veil back in, all the officers would be wondering why the hell a mountain lion is in their jail cell and shoot me without a trial. At the thought of a cage I felt Mr. Bitey stir in the back of my head. "Nope, not going to happen." I stared back at Jake. "You shoot me and nobody will tell you anything at all. If you put me in a cage, I'm dead and you're dead."
"Because your friends who blew up the grocery store will come for you?"
Officer May cut in. "How do we stop this?"
Now there was a good question. The answer was simple enough. You convince Jules to turn off his machine and hope Rudy was wrong about the Veil stamping Grantsville out of existence. However, sending the cops directly at Jules seemed like a bad first step. Jules wouldn't listen, but Jowls might.
"Well? Stop thinking about how much to tell us and tell us!" Jake voice cracked, and panic flashed into his eyes for a brief moment before he remastered his stern expression.
"You don't stop this," I said. "You take care of the people in this town the best you can. I have to get ahold of cops who deal with magic. This isn't your jurisdiction." Cops who really wouldn't care about the wiping out of an entire neighborhood. I wanted to tell these people, have them storm the gates of the park in a valorous hail of bullets, but it'd be like tossing hamsters onto an electric fence. Wards would be in place now, wards none of them could see. And if they did get through, it was Noise that would be the biggest target in their sights, not the magi.
He lowered the gun a fraction of an inch. "You can get a signal out? How?"
"I'm magic." Translation: I'm lying through my teeth. I turned and walked into the forest, waiting for a bullet in my back with every step.
Soon as I was out of line of sight (and bullet vectors) I opened the link to Richard.
Thomas! Where are you? There's a transition in less than an hour!
I growled. Behind me car doors slammed. The only thing I want you to be doing in the next hour is sealing off that shallowing. I need to have a chat with Jules.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Rudy hadn't reappeared when Richard drove up in a rusty old pickup truck. I didn't worry too much about it, as he would take care of himself and probably show up at a clutch time to bail me out or blow something up.
Richard on the other hand didn't appear to be a reliable looking human. Compared to the stoic front of a three-man Borg collective, he was a mass of twitching nerves. Dread leaked out his pores so heavily that it cut through the car exhaust. He popped open the passenger side and shrank away from me. "It’s not my fault," he muttered defensively.
I held the image of the family of four devouring their neighbor firmly in my head. "What, you thought if I didn't see it that would make it okay?"
He rolled out, the standard magus excuses already forming on his tongue.
"Save it," I told him. "Just help me stop it. We have to convince Jules to reconnect us to the real world."
"They're working on getting rid of the hunger plane. After all, it results in zero tass anyway." He gave me a weak smile.
***
The p
ark had been turned into a construction project. A steel latticework of beams encased Jules' magic pill, the skeleton of a building that would encapsulate the prize of House Technomagi. Noise held a huge riveter with one massive hand on the roof as we pulled into the parking lot. She wore a pair of overalls and red shirt the trio had woven together a few days ago. After Noise revealed that she knew how to weld, Sandra had rigged her a pair of goggles that fit over her eyes. Assisting her were two clanks about the same size as the one Rudy had piloted. These were automatous but pretty stupid. Their eyes peered down at us with a greenish light of a summoned spirit.
A large tent had been set up in the parking lot, an army surplus job, long as a shipping trailer and tall enough for Jules to comfortably stand.
Pretty far from a dark wizard laughing maniacally in their tower of doom. I suppose if you looked at it sideways, all the power cables snaking in and out of the tent, you might term it a slightly sinister but scrappy tech startup. At least the air had the decency to feel evil. Being this close to the wound in reality still made everything uncertain. The outlines of objects wriggled like worms out of your viewpoint and almost but not quite made it back to their original positions. I just hoped Jules and Jowls, who I'd counted as friends, hadn't become as bad as the monsters in that development. Surely Jowls at least would see reason.
I got out of the truck and pushed myself through the flap of the tent. Two rather expensive looking 3d printers whirred on either side of the entrance. Jules sat behind a plastic folding table so new that I could smell the fresh chemicals in the air. Jowls curled up in a box near the corner of the table, the shine of his iris visible through the slit of an eye.
Jules sat up as I entered, knitting his fingers together on the table. "I've been hearing that you're a bit upset. Let’s talk."
I didn't like the tone or the angle. That table didn't particularly look stable enough to support my weight, and as intimidating as it would be to have a 200-pound cat up close on your desk, the effect would have been countered if I crashed to ground or had to check my balance every step. Instead I wander among the machinery in the tent. Various 3d printers, laser cutters and boxes of materials lay scattered about.
Marking Territory (Freelance Familiars Book 2) Page 20
